“At any given time, there's a choir of ideas and nagging voices in my head — chatter that I had to contend with I guess — in the end it ends up with this model of working and living in which everything is happening simultaneously.” Aleksandar Hemon, author of National Book Award Finalist The Lazarus Project , has no shortage of accomplishments, including screenwriting credits on Sense8 and The Matrix: Revolutions . He’s back with The World and All That it Holds , an epic love story spanning deca...
Jan 24, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast This Double Shot episode features two authors, one familiar and one who soon will be, each tackling similar themes. Through fiction and essays these authors explore social politics and sexual freedom — listen in as both talk separately with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Madyson. A Guest at the Feast is a collection of essays by Colm Tóibín on topics ranging from his own cancer diagnosis, how reading the diaries of Thom...
Jan 21, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I wanted to spend time with a family and haunted house books are always about families.” Grady Hendrix’s bone-chilling novels The Final Girl Support Group and Horrorstör will have fans knocking at the door for his newest book, How to Sell a Haunted House . This new take on a classic horror story forces readers to confront one of the most frightening things there is: family. Hendrix joins us to talk about what makes a home into a haunted house, the horrifying history of puppets and dolls, the di...
Jan 19, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Two witty novels, two funny women, and two engaging interviews await you in this Double Shot episode of Poured Over. This pair of authors and their stories of relationships and what happens when they end fit so well together - if you’re a fan of one, you’re sure to love the other. Listen in as both authors talk separately with host Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Jamie and Madyson. Schitt’s Creek writer Monica Heisey’s debut novel REALLY GOOD, ACTUA...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast “That's one of those epiphanies - I realized if I wanted to be taken seriously, I needed representation. And who better than to do it than a man who doesn't exist, who's really me? Yeah, it was the perfect decoy.” You’ve heard her plucking guitar strings & heartstrings – now Margo Price sits down with guest host Allyson Gavaletz to talk about her new album Strays, songcraft, exorcising demons, trading jokes with Willie Nelson and being honest with herself on this episode of Poured Over. Featured...
Jan 14, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I remember being in an English class in high school (12th grade actually). We were reading The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and I announced to the teacher that I could have written a better ending … And I remember the look of shock on the teacher's face because she probably thought I was so arrogant and presumptuous. I don't know how I would have ended it. But I remember thinking that I could have I could have come up with a better ending.” Who among us hasn’t been tempted to rewrite a cl...
Jan 12, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “And I always tend to start a book with a very popcorn sensibility, like, oh, well, this’ll be fun, we're gonna have a little romp . And then to tell the story, honestly, you tend — especially when you're talking about things like institutional power and social influence and economic influence — you're going to bump up against some pretty heavy themes. And that certainly happened with Ninth House and again with Hell Bent .” No one does magic and mayhem and unforgettable characters like Leigh Bar...
Jan 10, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast “But now, with the rise of new money, it's like there's this moment in India, when new money was eclipsing old money. And that's the moment that I basically find really interesting because I happen to be right there observing, and just talking to people and listening and picking up stories.” You might have missed Deepti Kapoor’s debut, A Bad Character , in 2014; you absolutely do not want to miss Age of Vice , her fast-paced, epic novel of crime and corruption (and the first of three volumes in ...
Jan 05, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our January Discover and B&N Book Club picks have lots in common: both are debut novels with indelible characters and an unforgettable story, both are graduates of UT’s Michener Center for Writers — think of this episode as an audio boxed set, as both authors sit down separately with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. Tracey Rose Peyton knew she was taking on a major challenge with a narrative about enslaved women in 1850’s Texas — and even tossed an entire early draft — but she knew she had what ...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast We're closing out 2022 with something new: A Poured Over Double Shot with host Miwa Messer. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t really do interviews — If you want to know about the work, it’s on the page, he says. Jenny Jackson and Chip Kidd are part of the team that publish McCarthy; Jenny’s been his editor for the last eight years, and Chip has designed McCarthy’s hardcover jackets from 1992’s All the Pretty Horses all the way up to this fall’s The Passenger and Stella Maris , along with the recent reissu...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast “They have traveled for most of the day using what little daylight the season offers leaving Ferrara Dawn and riding out to what he had told her was a hunting lodge, far in the northwest of the province. 'But this is no hunting lodge' is what Lucrezia had wanted to say when they reach their destination, a high walled edifice of dark stone flanked on one side by dense forest and on the other by a twisting meander of the Po River. She would have liked to turn in her saddle and ask, 'Why have you b...
Dec 13, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast “It is an amazing, amazing translation experience….But it took a long time to get to the point where the language started moving because you have to start out sort of in English laying down a rock, rocks, and then a rock and a rock, building a wall. It doesn't move, and it's just right, right next to the ground. And because you can't obviously start translating in full sentences really. My whole idea was this to just stick absolutely close to the earth of her syntax and build up. And you build a...
Dec 08, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast “One of my favorite places to take a little walk around is the public cemetery, which is on a little hill that overlooks the bay. And you know, if you ever wanted to be buried somewhere, that's the place to be buried. And right across the street from it, and a little ways down the road is this beautiful canyon you can walk up. The trees are covered with Spanish moss, and there's fog. And so it's perfect place — if you believe in ghosts — to see one.” A murder mystery set in 1850’s Monterey, Cali...
Dec 06, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Storytelling can just be you understanding yourself, but it turns into something else when it's a shared piece — so much of anything in life is practice, and just pure showing up…I think that's just important to remember, you're not always going to feel inspired or inspirational, or you're not going to feel you've done your best. And you just have to ignore that voice and keep going.” Lauren Graham ( Talking as Fast as I Can ) is an absolute delight on the page and on the screen ( Gilmore Girls...
Dec 01, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I loved it more than everybody. And afterwards, I thought for the first time, whatever I do, I've got to get as close to that as I can . Not the noise or the music or being a rock star, but the creativity of it and the energy of it and the way that you affect people, and I knew that my life wouldn't be the same. And it's kind of always been like that.” Nick Hornby ( High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, About a Boy and Juliet, Naked , among others) returns with Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Ge...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast “I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. And you know, nobody was expected to be a novelist — that was not a thing, that was not a choice in my neighborhood. And when I made that choice, it was very strange to people. And it was a really hard thing for people to accept and my father and my grandfather did not understand that at all. And they discouraged me. But then once I succeeded, they really claimed that, and my grandfather would tell everyone…” Matthew Quick ( The Silver Linings Playbook )...
Nov 26, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast "One of the ways you can get into my cast of characters is by leaving a very detailed written record. Because that's what we historians have to work from, you're not allowed to make stuff up like a novelist can… And, of course, it skews, to some extent, the way history is written. Because the rich leave more records than the poor, men leave more records than women, white people leave more records than Black and so on.” Adam Hochschild ( King Leopold’s Ghost ) joins us on the show to talk about h...
Nov 24, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast "When I was a kid, I was super, super geeky, it was so nerdy. And all I read was dragon books, or ghost books, or elf books…someone tried to give me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird , and I just remember thinking, Where are the dragons? And when I went to do my doctorate in creative writing and literature —especially at the time, and even now, they kind of steamroll that out of you, they sort of train you to think that there are two things called literary and genre … if you're a good writer, and ...
Nov 22, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “They're rooted in our culture as well. And because of all that, I think they feel a little bit more real, even though they are fantastical magical realms…and there's also this timeless quality in a way as well….I do think also there is a lot of room for imagination to grow in these stories.” Sue Lynn Tan joins guest host Kat Sarfas on the show to take readers behind the scenes of her latest epic, Heart of the Sun Warrior , the stunning sequel to Daughter of the Moon Goddess, from world-building...
Nov 19, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast “We are writing our stories to the world, as opposed to just reading the old stories. And somehow, some way accidentally, intentionally, desperately on the case and caught off guard, Art is Life captures this huge sweep and ends about where we are now in the present—which is an epic place as well.” Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jerry Saltz ( How to Be An Artist ) is consistently one of the smartest, freshest and liveliest voices in art criticism and he joins us on the show to talk about his new ...
Nov 17, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I'm really driven by poetry. I'm really driven by language. But also, I'm driven by a desire to connect with the people. So I could have been a teacher. I could have been a politician. I could have been anyone that communicates with people verbally because I liked that. I wound up a performer, but it was all rooted in poetry. And as a book person, I have loved books since I was a toddler.” Writer, performer, National Book Award Winner (Just Kids), Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, and Rock an...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast “It's hard to be funny, you can't really plan on — you don't know what will land with people…. absurdity just exists constantly in the world that we live in. And to my mind, the humor comes from the way different people traverse absurdity, how they try to normalize it, or how they freak out because they want to build their own weirdness on top of it. And so for me, that's where I get a lot of the humor, just the different ways that people respond to the absurdity around them.” Kevin Wilson ( Not...
Nov 12, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I had never known what it was like to feel full. And I know that sounds like really odd, but because most people can — I would be with friends and a friend would stop eating. She's like, I'm full. And I'm like, What's wrong with me that I don't know what it feels like to feel full? And I don't know what the answer to that question is, to this day. I don't know if it's a psychological or emotional thing, or if it was an actual physical thing that like my tummy was bottomless. But this feeling of...
Nov 10, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I always feel like as a reader, I always want to go in ready to be changed, ready to be transformed by what I'm reading, ready to be expanded. And that's what I love about books, they work on you kind of like magic.” Madeline Miller’s novels, The Song of Achilles and Circe , keep working their magic on readers everywhere. She joins us on the show to take listeners behind the scenes of her new novella, Galatea , in a very fun conversation that covers voice, subverting stories, Troilus & Cressida...
Nov 08, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast “More people than we realize are works in progress, are trying to figure out a way to think about the world… As Beyoncé said in her new album, they're contradicted. They're internally contradicted more than we think. We can make the kind of change we seek, we deserve in this country, if we allow the idea that more of us are contradicted, more of us need help sorting through the world, and we have the patience — we can muster that kind of patience and love to help people sort through how they see...
Nov 05, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast “…The idea just kind of spun itself into existence in my head, the world started to form almost immediately — when my creative brain kind of immediately kicks in like that, I've learned to listen to it, because usually, that means something, something good is trying to come out.” N.K. Jemisin — winner of three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel (each of the Broken Earth books) and now a fourth for Best Graphic Story or Comic ( Far Sector ), and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient — is one of ...
Nov 03, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “…It was at the end of an exhibition called The Art of The Troubles . And that had been a little controversial (as these things very often are in post-conflict societies). Some people felt it had gone too far. Other people felt that it hadn't gone far enough. It just made me think about how maybe art could be used to say things that are really unsayable in a place where people are obsessed with language and obsessed with identity and where languages are so problematic.” Louise Kennedy joins us o...
Nov 01, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast "We don't know our parents, I mean, we think we do; you know, all of us have a practice of dealing with contained worlds. And that practice begins with our families, it begins with our parents, because these are individuals that we don't fully understand, but we are completely dependent on for our survival... And so it creates this really interesting situation where, you know, we take them for granted in a certain way, we think we understand them, but we don't. I want to see if I could get that ...
Oct 29, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I was always writing, and I think it goes back to that Charlotte's Web thing when I had that experience of something taking me out of this world. It was mysterious, and transcendent, and glorious. And I'm still searching for that every day — if I can find a story that will do that to me and just kind of mystify me and leave me a slightly different person than I was before.” Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult joined us on stage at our flagship store on Union Square in New York City to talk ...
Oct 27, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “People write medical histories, people write personal case histories, I didn't want to do either. People write memoirs; I wanted to do all of them in the same book. And I wanted to do that without blurring the boundaries between any and all of those… I consider those parts of living history.” Siddhartha Mukherjee is an oncologist, a professor, a bestselling author and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer . He joins us on the show to t...
Oct 25, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
